"The Ocean" In The Threads of the Scarlet Letter, Richard Kopley suggests that
the scene in The Scarlet Letter in which Chillingworth approaches the
sleeping minister may have been inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Tell-Tale
Heart.” (courtesy of University
of Delaware Press)

Evidence for Hawthorne’s use of Poe in that novel [SL] is a clear pattern
of parallels

between “The Tell-Tale Heart” and The Scarlet Letter. In
Poe’s story, for seven nights at “about midnight” a young man “thrust[s]” his
head inside the “chamber” of a sleeping “old man” with an “Evil Eye,” and opens
a lantern “cautiously (for the hinges creaked)” and shines it upon this “Evil
Eye” (Collected Works 3; 792-93).
…

In Hawthorne’s novel, an “old man”… with an “evil eye”—the physician Roger Chillingworth—seeks
something “far worse than death” (1: 196): the violation of the guilty heart
of the adulterous young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. In the critical tenth chapter
of the The Scarlet Letter, “The Leech and His Patient,” Poe’s story
is approximated by Hawthorne’s presentation of a related figurative event and
a similarly related literal one. Initially, Hawthorne writes that Chillingworth,
as he probes for Dimmesdale’s secret, “groped along as stealthily, with as cautious
a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies
only half asleep,--or, it may be, broad awake” (1:130). Hawthorne adds, “In
spite of his premeditated carefulness, the floor would now and then creak.”
And just as Poe’s “old man” sense “the unperceived shadow” of “Death” (Collected
Works 3: 794), so, too, does Dimmesdale “become vaguely aware” of “the
shadow of [Chillingworth’s] presence” (1: 130). The figurative becomes literal
when Chillingworth, this “old man” with an “evil eye,” actually enters “at noonday”
the room of the sleeping young man, lays “his hand upon [the minister’s] bosom,”
“thrust[s] aside the vestment,” and discovers the scarlet letter on Dimmesdale’s
breast—the sign of the minister’s secret guilt (1:138). Chillingworth has trespassed,
causing a spiritual exposure “far worse then [sic] death.” Poe’s intruder had
taken a life; Hawthorne’s intruder thinks he has taken a soul. (30)